Honoring Police Sacrifice

Hampton officers remember their fallen peers and pay tribute to current ones.

Christine Blair-Wallace's father was the hit of show-and-tell when he would let the kids sit in his patrol car and make the siren wail.

Her memories of him, though aged by the thirteen years that have passed since his death, are still bright. She remembers a teddy bear of a man who took his daughter seriously but never himself.

"He was goofy," Blair-Wallace recalled. "I remember him being silly and always laughing."

Blair-Wallace's father, a Hampton police officer, was killed in the line of duty when she was eight. Now 21, she sat in the audience Monday during Hampton's annual police memorial service where about 50 people gathered in Honor Park to remember Kenneth Wallace and the two other Hampton officers killed in the line of duty.

At the park, located between City Hall and the Public Safety Building in downtown Hampton, a number of current officers were also honored for service and bravery.

Police Chief Chuck Jordan exhorted his officers to remember the sacrifices of the fallen.

"You are the shield of our city," he said. "Every day, when others see danger and run, you charge toward it."

Wallace was shot as part of a plot by a drug ring while sitting in his patrol car in 1994.

"It was a deep sacrifice he made," said Wallace's father, Thomas Wallace. "I'm blessed that there have not been any deaths since Kenneth."

Before Wallace, 19 years had passed since the previous Hampton police fatality. Mark Decuypere was killed in 1975. A third officer, Ralph Ghivizzani, was killed in 1943.

Bronze busts of each officer ring the park, which was formally dedicated in 1995, according to the Hampton Police Web site.

Wallace was remembered by his peers as a true community police officer, who worked to be a good role model for young people, they said, and to show the public that police were out to help them, not just to make arrests.

Blair-Wallace, his only child, has followed his example. In her third year at Virginia Commonwealth University, she is majoring in criminal justice.

But she said she won't be a police officer.

"I've told her she doesn't want a job carrying a gun. She isn't going to wear a uniform," said her grandfather. "I'm just very proud of her. It's very hard to go into criminology when your father died in the line of duty. We miss him every day, every holiday, every vacation." *

Deaths on the line of duty

On Monday, the FBI released statistics on law enforcement deaths in 2006:

* 48 officers were slain in the line of duty -- seven fewer than in 2005.

* 46 of those were killed with firearms. Two were killed with vehicles.

* 26 of those killed were wearing body armor.

* 66 more officers died in accidents in the line of duty.

Newport News police memorial

Newport News will hold its annual memorial service for officers killed in the line of duty on Wednesday. Police will gather at the corner of 30th Street and Washington Avenue at 11:15 a.m. The ceremony will begin in front of City Hall at noon.